ART SCIENCE dialogue | Thursday, June 29: CANCELLED, new date to follow soon!

Unfortunately we have to inform you that the upcoming ART SCIENCE dialogue of June 29th – about the accessibility of data – will be postponed. A NEW DATE for this talk between Semiconductor and CoDa will be communicated soon on our website.

Topic: Accessibility

The work of semiconductor has been connected to scientific projects that are creating methods to increase accessibility of data. The academic project Cooperation Databank (CoDa) creates a meta-analysis of existing research on social behaviour to enable an easier search through this data. Both projects make existing knowledge accessible, however they do that in a totally different way. What makes knowledge truly accessible? How can we comprehend things and how does that compromises the truth?

Cooperation Databank (CoDa)

The scientific literature is expanding exponentially, while at the same time scientists are increasingly recognizing that many scientific studies fail to replicate. Therefore, scientists must rely on meta-analytic methods to aggregate the information across studies and to evaluate the entire body of evidence. However, retrieving and annotating the results of all relevant studies to conduct a meta-analysis can take considerable effort and time. The fact that this information is primarily stored in PDFs and not machine-readable, makes it impossible to automatically extract and aggregate study findings.

To embody these functions, a team of 30 international researchers jointly worked to build the Cooperation Databank (CoDa; Spadaro et al., 2022) – a machine-readable, multidisciplinary, open access databank of empirical studies that use economic games paradigms to study human cooperation. To annotate this body of knowledge, we developed an ontology that represents the relations between these concepts. Then, we have created a research platform that enables users to perform targeted literature search and queries, in order to retrieve studies that test the relation of specific variables with cooperation. Such a platform allows users to visualise these study results, and perform on demand meta-analyses, meta-regressions, estimates of publication bias, and statistical power analyses for future studies.

Semiconductor: Spectral Constellations (2021) Installation with generative animations on LED mosaics A Semiconductor work by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt.

Semiconductor is a UK artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt. Their work explores the material nature of our world and how we experience it through the lenses of science and technology. Spectral Constellations is a series of generative animations, driven by scientific data of young stars. This data, collected by scientists using a method called Spectroscopy, creates an understanding of structures around distant young stars, where gas and dust come together to form planets. Scientists study the light this matter emits using prisms to split it into its constituent wavelengths, revealing its elemental make-up. By analyzing this data over time, spatial formations of the matter can be decoded.

Semiconductor have worked with this spectral data as a physical material, translating it into rings of light which resemble the gradiated discs of planetary and stellar formations. As the data ebbs and flows it introduces a sense of form and motion, waveforms merge and interfere revealing patterns and rhythms, and engage our human tendency towards pattern recognition.

The work brings into tangible experience that which is outside of what is humanly perceivable, confronting the viewer with information which is ordinarily outside of a human scale, both of time and space. Detached from its scientific framework, data becomes a material in its own form, creating a space for reflection upon our relationship to phenomena at the extremities of our perception.

Their work seek to bring about a questioning of our position as observer, and a critical reflection upon how perception of the material world is always technologically mediated. Scale is harnessed to confront, through stretching the imagination and to position the human subject as part of the wider ecosystem of our universe.